Software Program to Write Better

It hit me the other day I haven’t talked about what tool I use to write with. By tool I mean software program. I use Scrivner. I know, kind of a strange title. I wondered about that myself. It’s a medieval English occupational surname for a 'writer', a clerk, especially one who writes and copies books and manuscripts.

The Scrivner team is small, looks like about five people headquartered in Cornwall England. The program was developed by one of the team to help him and I’m quoting here, “get a grip on my writing, notes and research, to organize it and start putting it all together like a jigsaw.”

I’m a Mac user and Scrivner was built for the Mac. Therefore it’s stable. I understand there is a Windows version on the way. There isn’t an iPad version yet but with a few third party apps you can sync and go mobile.

Scrivner is simple. It’s a word processor and project management tool. Here’s how they describe Scrivener on their website: “you can enter a synopsis for each document on a virtual index card and then stack and shuffle the cards in the corkboard until you find the most effective sequence. Plan out your work in Scrivener’s outliner and use the synopses you create as prompts while you write. Or just get everything down into a first draft and break it apart later for rearrangement on the outliner or corkboard.”

I like the corkboard concept. This is where you can store index cards. I use one card per chapter. It’s how I plan out my novel. For reading all the index cards I switch to the outline, helps me take my plan to the next level.

Oh yeah, there is even tutorials on YouTube. How convenient is that?

It’s worth checking out. I’m on my 6th novel using Scrivner.

http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php

all the best

Norm Applegate

Into the Basement

First To Die